I’m Rejecting Gender in My 40s After a Misogynistic, Catholic Upbringing

Forcing people to conform to gender roles leads to misogyny, bigotry, assault, and trauma. I know from first-hand experience.

Iwas raised in a misogynistic, Catholic, Latin American household where women had to be subservient to men. They had to be virgins until they got married, when they would be passed off to yet another man.

This type of 1950s sexist home life is a conservative’s wet dream. It’s the life that they’re trying to force on all Americans right now with their resurrection of anti-abortion laws and the creation of anti-gay and trans bills.

That puritanical ideology that conservatives love to preach about is hell on Earth for anyone who isn’t a straight, white male. But even for the privileged, it can be a prison.

Despite being unemployed most of the time, the male warden still considered himself ‘the man of the house’ and terrorized both the female warden, who was the primary breadwinner, and me. He abused alcohol and drugs and was prone to explosive anger at the most random of times. You never knew when he would be calm or when he’d go on a rampage. He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and most likely had untreated bipolar disorder.

I grew up being told that women existed for men and had to cook and clean. By seven years of age, I knew how to cook and stayed home by myself while the wardens worked. I actually welcomed being on my own, since I hated when my aunt and her sadistic, Mormon husband babysat me.

According to the wardens, I had two options in life because of the genitals that I was born with: be a virgin or a whore.

Husbands could have sex whenever they asked for it and wives had to comply no matter what they wanted. As a young child, I saw the female warden being sexually assaulted more times than I could count. She said “no” every time but he still forced himself on her.

Since I was assigned female at birth, my body was not my own. It belonged to the male warden and would belong to my husband once I married. And I had to marry a man eventually. I was told that being queer was worse than being dead.

The male and female warden would fight constantly over everything. One moment things were calm and the next moment they were in a shouting match.

The “man of the house” would frequently yell at me for the most random reasons. One time, I was slapped for making a suggestion about the female warden’s birthday card. I never knew what was going to set him off. I found his abrupt anger, yelling, and breaking things more traumatic than the sexual assaults.

The female warden allowed this abuse and never left him despite her being the breadwinner and financially able to leave at any time. She was raised to be subservient to men. Growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a subservient and stupid mother taught her to be complacent and weak. So she just went along with domestic violence like it was normal because to her it was.

The male warden’s father was psychotic and stabbed him when he lost some money while walking to the market. When I had to live with him, he would show me the long dark scars all over his arms and back from his father stabbing him.

The grand-wardens learned their abuse and lack of self-control from their parents and so on and so on. Generations of pain, abuse and forcing strict gender roles ran through both sides of my bloodline. No one along that long, dark river of pain and blood bothered to stop the generational trauma until it fell on me.

As a kid, I learned that relationships were about anger, and fear instead of love and understanding. I was never loved as a child and instead used like a toy. I existed to make the wardens happy and had to do what they wanted. I complied for a bit because I didn’t know that rebelling was an option. Once I became a teenager though, I finally had a mind of my own and realized that everything the wardens stood for was toxic and wrong.

Everything I was taught about “men” and “women,” including how people with those labels were supposed to act, was a total lie and harmful to society.

I was labeled a “girl” and then a “woman” without my consent. And with that label, I was confined to a life and ideology that I never agreed with and never wanted.

Drag Superstar, Pangina Heals, performing a Sia number in Bangkok | Photo by the author

Sex Was Empowering

Because I was a “girl” I had to be a virgin until marriage despite the male warden sexually abusing me before I could even understand what sex was. When I turned 15, I rejected everything that I was told I had to be just because I was born with a certain type of genitals. I had sex on my own terms and all of it was consensual.

I was promiscuous as a teen and had several boyfriends and one-night stands. Despite my conservative, Catholic upbringing — or because of it — I was a libertine and had no shame or hang-ups about sex. I did what I wanted and whoever I wanted. My sexuality was a form of empowerment and rebellion against my awful upbringing and an antiquated belief system that had ruined my life and my mental health.

During high school, I labeled myself as bisexual, but I didn’t tell the wardens that since it was none of their damn business and it would just cause more fights. We were fighting all the time since everything I did was evil and wrong and everything they did was stupid and abusive.

When I had a girlfriend for a few months during my sophomore year, I introduced her as my “friend” to the wardens. Since she was a butch lesbian and masculine presenting, they had an inkling that I might not be straight, but they surprisingly ignored it.

I kept my sex life to myself until the female warden went through my room, found a bunch of used condoms in my trash, and sent me to the mental hospital for “being out of control.”

I actually enjoyed staying at the mental hospital since I felt more relaxed there and free to be myself. I got to be around other teenagers my age who were also there because they were “out of control.”

Only a couple of teens had serious mental health issues that warranted them being institutionalized. The rest of us were typical teenagers who were raised in bad conditions with abusive parents, poverty, and gang-filled neighborhoods. Had we been born with nice, loving parents who supported us and listened to us instead of trying to control us and treat us like objects, we would have been fine and mentally stable…for the most part.

After I got out of the mental hospital, the male warden became even more abusive and didn’t even want me to close my bedroom door, but I rebelled even more. I had more sex, started doing drugs, and would sneak out of the house several times a week to party and get laid. I hardly attended school and ditched most days.

I explored my sexuality as well as psychedelics. Had I known that I had the option to reject my gender, I would have done it a lot sooner.

Drag artist, Kandy Zyanide, performing at an event in Bangkok | Photo by the author

Dressing “Slutty” Was A Political Act

Because I wasn’t allowed to wear short skirts, fishnet stockings, and look “slutty” as a teen, that’s how I would dress most of the time. From my mid-teens to early 30s, I’d wear short skirts and thigh-high fishnets held up with black garter belts. My boobs and ass would always be hanging out.

Because of how I dressed and acted, the male warden would slut-shame me all the time and I’d even be called a slut in high school, mainly by teenage boys who knew they had no chance with me. That just made me even more blatantly sexual.

The way I dressed and my libertine ways were a form of empowerment and a political act for me. I was taking back the “slut” label and owning it. Even though I looked hyper-feminine at the time, I was never a fan of being called a “girl” or a “woman.”

Being labeled a “woman” meant that my body didn’t belong to me. I was always the property of the man of the house. It meant that my rights and autonomy didn’t matter.

Strict gender roles led to me being sexually abused as a toddler, slut-shamed, and emotionally terrorized until I turned 21 and finally moved out of the house for good. I have been no contact with all blood relations ever since. Good riddance!

Performer at Maggie Choo’s in Bangkok | Photo by the author

No Gender

Using “they/their” pronouns was not a thing when I was growing up. I’d never heard anyone use those pronouns despite having a lot of queer friends and growing up in liberal, LGBTQIA-friendly Los Angeles.

It wasn’t until I was well into my 30s that I realized that questioning gender and rejecting “he/she” was an option. I had been living in Thailand for several years already.

Most of my friends are either women or gay men, so I spend a lot of time in queer spaces. Once I started hearing people talking about being non-binary and genderfluid, I explored that and decided in my late 30s that I didn’t want a label for my gender at all.

After turning 40, I started using “they/their” pronouns and finally feel like myself.

When someone calls me a woman, it doesn’t sound right to me. It does bother me even though I know they don’t mean anything bad by it. They are just going along with what they have been taught. I still shave my body, pluck my eyebrows, and occasionally wear makeup, all things associated with being feminine — even though anyone can do those things or not do them.

Despite rocking black unisex t-shirts and shorts most days, I still appear female to people and get called “madam” when I go shopping. I hate it, but I never correct them.

Aside from wanting to lose weight, I have no desire to change my body in any way. I’m fine having boobs and a vagina, but I’m not fine with the social beliefs around having said body parts. I don’t need to act a certain way, dress a certain way, or be sexual or non-sexual in a certain way just because I have a vagina. My vag is none of your business.

I grew up having to conform to strict gender roles only to be sexually and emotionally abused and witness domestic abuse and marital rape.

Having strict gender roles leads to misogyny, assault, and darkness. According to Save the Children’s website:

“Harmful gender roles result in many types of inequalities between girls and boys. However, while gender norms can affect all children, they are proven to disproportionately affect girls. More than 575 million girls live in countries where inequitable gender norms contribute to violations of their rights, like health, education, marriage, and gender-based violence.”

Whenever I hear about “trad wives,” “family values,” “men are men and women are women,” or other conservative, poisonous rhetoric, I bristle with anger because these people are shilling nothing but hatred and pain. They’re trying to bring in a world that looks exactly like Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Very few people — even if they’re fine with their assigned gender label and consider themselves straight — can keep up with the impossible expectations of a conservative, gendered existence. Not even crooked, conservative politicians believe their own bullshit behind closed doors, hence so many ending up in sex scandals.

These politicians — and the unhinged people who support such sexist and bigoted policies — claim it’s to “save the children,” but this ideology harms children and causes higher rates of child abuse.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Family Violence found a link between child abuse and gender inequality, stating:

“We found all three gender inequity indices to be significantly associated with physical abuse and two of the three to be significantly associated with neglect, after controlling for country-level development. Based on these findings, efforts to prevent child abuse and neglect might benefit from reducing gender inequity.”

Misogyny doesn’t just hurt children, women, and queer people, it also hurts straight men too, since not all men can conform to a hyper-masculine standard. Everyone suffers under the patriarchy.

With conservative Christian extremists taking away reproductive rights and passing homophobic and transphobic bills across the U.S., this point is further proven.

That’s why I refuse all gender labels and refuse to label my sexuality. I don’t care if someone else wants to use labels, I care when someone’s beliefs about gender and sexuality are forced on others and are taking away people’s rights, thus causing harm and trauma to a big chunk of the population.

Gender roles are a social construct that exist to control people. Forcing gender conformity leads to domestic abuse, rape, child abuse, child sex abuse, and violence against the LGBTQIA+ community.

To truly save the children, we need to throw away these outdated and harmful notions, and bring forth an evolved society that sees all humans as equals who deserve the same rights, respect, and freedom.